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10 Questions for New Social Networking Mogul M.C. Hammer

Mark it up to perseverance, but M.C. Hammer may just be too legit to quit. While many of his 90s-party-hop contemporaries (one Vanilla Ice comes to mind) have relegated themselves to Surreal Life and Bar Mitzvah appearances, Hammer has spent the past 15-or-so years moving beyond baggy pants and into blogging, preaching (he hosts a show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and was the minister at Corey Feldman's 2002 wedding) and singing Toby Keith-style post-9/11 anthems ("No Stoppin' Us (USA)" sample lyric: "You can sign me up and put me on the first flight.") Hammer's next hat: social networking guru, as one of the founder's of DanceJam, a sort of Facebook for dancers, where people can share videos of their moves, and make friends with likeminded poppers and boppers. He sat down with PM to talk dance history, slo-mo Web video, startup meetings at a Silicon Valley Cheesecake Factory and, yes, hammers themselves.

What kind of features can you do with DanceJam that you can't find on other social networking sites? Obviously, people can share videos and other things, but the concept is that YouTube has videos of everything under the sun, but this is specifically for people who are looking for dance?

Yeah, the difference isand I'm a big fan of YouTubebut in particular with dance, there's no community around dance. And what we do is bring the actual community around dance, the ability to also compete in dance, and we have unique features in our functionality, in our user interface, that's a lot different than some of the things that are out there on any social network right now.

What kinds of unique features exactly?

One, if you're watching a video on our player, you can click a buttonit's a small emblem, it looks like a turtle. And if you click on it, it puts the video into slow motion.

Interesting. So you can study what the moves are and try to recreate it yourself?

Absolutely. You can break the moves all the way down, and also just see how great it looks when you see certain movements in slow motion. It's very powerful.

You say there's no community around dance. Do you mean online or do you mean in the real world kind of, the dance community is

In the real world, there's a huge community of dance. Huge. There's no realthat I know of, anywaynot any real popular place that that the dance culture exists and can interact online.

So you guys are imagining sort of a library of dance history in a way?

Absolutely. That is one of the value-added aspects of DanceJam as a repository of all things dance, and of course again all the way to instructional videos of hot dances of today.

How did you get involved in the project?

A venture capitalist emailed me and I answered the email, and he said that he had heard that I had an interesting concept for some new social media destinations, and certainly I took him up on the email. I flew out to New York and we had a meeting. And at that meeting I threw out three concepts, and I had four networks that I thoughtor three communities that I thought would be interesting, and about seven or eight months later, they sent me an email and [we had a meeting] at a Cheesecake Factory right there on University of Menlo Park, right there by Stanford, Palo Alto. And he and I listened to one another and over the next four hours we decided that we had enough overlap in our concept that we should co-found this company together, and we did.

When did the site go live?

The site is just going live now, so we're somewhere between what I call a closed beta and an invitation-only. [Laughs]

You kind of imagined, I'm assuming, this kind of fitting into people's media diets in a way that wouldn't necessarily replace Facebook or MySpace, but kind of be just where they would go for their dance fix, right?

Right, exactly. Our entertainment fix, or again for interacting with the creative, artsy side of the brainjust interacting with people who are on that same vibe. Absolutely, this is not saying you leave your Facebook or you leave your MySpace; this is in addition to them.

I'm sure you've had a Web site in the past, but this is a different ballgame.

But it's different, yeah. It's bling. It's a very big bling.

Just one more question for you, and this is kind of silly because your name is Hammer. But we do a lot of tool coverage. Are you good with hammers? Can you offer any tips for people who use them?

Yeah, move your thumb out the way.

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